Dickson raises, but doesn’t answer, fascinating questions about personal transformation, religion and aesthetics.
A novel of metaphysical and aesthetic mystery.
Sheridan Ridler is something of a jerk—a womanizing, dope-smoking, self-centered artist, nurturing himself and his genius but odious when it comes to human relationships. When gallery owner and art agent Talbot Graves realizes that Ridler’s canvases, which he’s been selling for impressive profits to the likes of Zero Mostel, would be even more valuable were the supply limited, he decides to off the artist. But what starts out as a planned murder becomes a freakish accident when Graves’ car bumps Ridler into the Harlem River. Although Graves is certain Ridler is dead, the artist emerges bruised but reborn—in his temporary watery grave he’s seen “the Glory,” an evanescent image of transcendence that he now longs to paint. He disappears for 25 years, traveling the world (Mexico, Rome, Istanbul, Paris), and eventually hooks up with a seedy little circus run by the symbolically named Esperanza. During this time, Ridler seeks out works of other artists who have tried to convey the ineffable, and he paints furiously, trying to capture this same Mystery. When his frustration peaks, he anonymously mails paintings to Suzanna and to Graves, apologizing for his previous behavior and hoping that their forgiveness will give him another glimpse of the Glory. But when Graves discusses this new gift with Emil Lacuna, incongruously a cold-blooded killer and a collector of Ridlers, Emil knows that the value of his collection will diminish impressively if new canvases hit the market, so he murders Graves and stalks Ridler. Complicating the narrative is Gemma, Ridler’s daughter by Suzanna, though Ridler doesn’t know of her existence—she’s an art expert who authenticates the new Ridler canvases and then goes on a quest to find her father.
Dickson raises, but doesn’t answer, fascinating questions about personal transformation, religion and aesthetics.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4165-8348-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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